Kweku Adoboli’s defence team told a London court today that the ex-UBS trader had been condemned to take sole blame for a $2.3bn trading loss at the Swiss bank by a “sneaky and sinister” former colleague and others.

Charles Sherrard QC, one of two barristers representing Adoboli, was this morning continuing his closing summary of the defence case in the trial of the former ETF trader.

Adoboli stands accused at London's Southwark Crown Court of two counts of fraud and four counts of false accounting. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in the case, which began in September.

Sherrard this morning told the court that Adoboli’s ex-colleague John Hughes had been "clearly and demonstrably involved in booking trades in the same way". Hughes was described as “sneaky and sinister”.

Sherrard reminded the jury of evidence given earlier during the trial when Hughes was in the witness stand.

"I put to Mr Hughes that the desk behaved as a team. He agreed."

Sherrard recalled a chat between Adoboli and Hughes which included the message: "We work as a team. One fails, we all fail. One succeeds, we all succeed."

Sherrard then told the jury: "It seems only one person on the team remembered that."

He said the four-man ETF trading team at UBS "fractured dramatically".

Prosecutors pursuing the case against Adoboli claim he acted dishonestly, but Sherrard challenged that assertion, citing both Adoboli’s alleged activity of funnelling withheld profits back into the official trading books and the former trader’s email, sent to a colleague on September 14 last year, that purportedly laid bare his trading.

“Would a dishonest person leak profits back, to cover costs? If you could hide $40m, why not keep it? Would he have sent that September 14 email at all? The fact of the matter is that his lies were told at the end, for a reason.”

Adoboli, said Sherrard, was “the embodiment of what a loyal and dedicated employee should be”.

After Sherrard closed the defence case, Mr Justice Keith, the judge presiding in the trial, began his summary statement to the jury, after which he is expected to ask the jury to retire to consider their verdict.